10 Things Sheryl Sandberg Gets Exactly Right In 'Lean In'

Before reading Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, I didn’t think I agreed with
Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg’s take on balancing work and family life. As a working mom myself, I felt much more sympathetic with Anne Marie Slaughter’s arguments in her much-read Atlantic magazine piece, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All.” In my own experience, I and my working mother friends felt horribly torn about how the demands of work conflicted with the rigors and desires of mothering. Slaughter put it concisely in the sub-head to her story: ”[T]he women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed.”

My assumption was that Sandberg wanted women to tough it out and push ahead with their careers while their kids were young, and to put success in the office ahead of the time-consuming, energy-sapping but ultimately deeply rewarding demands of parenting. I thought of my friend Esther, who was working for the BBC when she had her baby, Nick, while being required to fly from New York to London every month to meet with her bosses. When Nick was just five months old, a trip abroad meant Esther’s milk dried up and she had to quit nursing long before she had planned. “That was a low point,” she recalled to me just the other day.

In my own experience, carrying my son on the subway every day so that he could go to a daycare that was a half block from my office, and I could run over and nurse him when he got hungry, was both exhausting and satisfying. I wanted to do it but there was no way I could work flat out and advance my career much while I was pursuing that schedule. Fortunately Forbes kept me on while I kept my hours in check. I couldn’t have imagined “leaning in” while my son was a baby, nor did I want to try.

But now that I’ve read Sandberg’s book, I see that she is much more sensitive to the pull of mothering and how it conflicts with the demands of work. To be sure, she has more than a touch of what Slaughter calls the superhuman. And she certainly is rich (she didn’t make the 2013 Forbes Billionaires list but in October my colleague Ryan Macpegged her net worth at $500 million, and Facebook stock has gone up since then). On the other hand, she is sensitive to how difficult it can be to raise children while working hard and she writes about that subject with sophistication and thoughtful reflection on her first-hand experience.

But mostly Lean In is not so much about the balancing act of parenting versus working as it is about the challenges women face in trying to get ahead. Sandberg devotes only three of the book’s 11 chapters to work/family balance. The rest are about how women can take charge of their own careers and push forward at a time when gender bias is more alive and well than most of us may want to admit. Though she has been criticized for putting the onus on women to forge ahead on their own, I found her book full of careful research about how much sexism still pervades the workplace. Another strength of the book is her willingness to admit her own failings and self-doubt.

Here is what I think she gets exactly right about the challenge of becoming a successful female leader:

1. It’s incredibly difficult to manage both career and motherhood, even before you give birth.

In the book’s opening anecdote, Sandberg describes what a tough time she had while pregnant with her first child. She gained 70 pounds, her feet swelled two shoe sizes and she vomited every day for nine months. I read this and I thought immediately, she gets it.

2. She considers herself a feminist who benefits from the struggles of the activists who battled for women’s rights.

“We stand on the shoulders of the women who came before us, women who had to fight for the rights that we now take for granted,” she writes. True.

3. She points out that men still run the world.

Sandberg marshals plenty of statistics to support this fact. Example: “Of 197 heads of state, only 22 are women.” Another fact: Of the top 500 companies by revenues, only 21 are headed by women. In politics, women hold just 18% of congressional offices.

4. She gets it about women’s compensation.

Though it used to be worse—in 1970 American women made 59 cents for every dollar men earned—it’s still bad. In 2010, women earned just 77 cents for every dollar men made. Her solution: negotiate like a man. When she was talking to Mark Zuckerberg about joining Facebook, she says she was inclined to accept the first offer he made. But after her husband encouraged her to make a counter-offer, she did and Zuckerberg came back to her with a much more lucrative proposal.

5. She believes the feminist revolution has stalled.

Sandberg writes extensively about the barriers women still face in the workplace, including “blatant and subtle sexism, discrimination and sexual harassment.” Despite my impression that she ignored this topic, she underlines the importance of workplace flexibility and the need for accessible child care and parental leave policies. She also notes a 2011 McKinsey study showing that while men are promoted based on potential, women get a leg up based on past accomplishments.

6. She argues convincingly that internal obstacles hold women back.

This is the nut, and the most controversial part, of Sandberg’s book and the point that has stirred criticism among other feminists. She says that women keep themselves from advancing because they don’t have the self-confidence and drive that men do. “We lower our own expectations of what we can achieve,” she writes. Indeed, this is the part of the book that still gives me pause. I believe that personal motivation is an incredibly complex thing, molded by our internal will but also strongly influenced by the parenting we receive, the peer group that surrounds us as we grow, the educational opportunities we get, the connections we make, as well as the expectations and prejudices of those around us.

Sandberg agrees, at least in part. She cites more than a dozen studies that underline the obstacles women face. One of the most compelling, though 10 years old, still rings true. She calls it the Howard/Heidi study. Two professors wrote up a case study about a real-life entrepreneur named Heidi Roizen, describing how she became a successful venture capitalist by relying on her outgoing personality and huge personal and professional network. The professors had a group of students read Roizen’s story with her real name attached and another group read the story with the name changed to “Howard.” Then the students rated Howard and Heidi on their accomplishments and on how appealing they seemed as colleagues. While the students rated them equally in terms of success, they thought Howard was likeable while Heidi seemed selfish and not “the type of person you would want to hire or work for.” Sandberg’s conclusion: when a man is successful, he is well liked. When a woman does well, people like her less.

Sandberg writes about the conundrum this presents for women. Most of us want to be liked. But if our success means that others don’t like us, how motivated are we to do well? Sandberg admits that she has undermined her own accomplishments for fear that others would be turned off. Then she exhorts women to overcome the Howard/Heidi stereotype and advocate on their own behalf. She tells a concise story to illustrate her point: At her first performance review with Zuckerberg six months into her job at Facebook, he told her that her desire to be liked by everyone was holding her back. If you please everyone, he said, you won’t change anything. “Mark was right,” she writes. “Everyone needs to get more comfortable with female leaders,” she insists, “including female leaders themselves.”

7. She makes a strong contrarian point about mentors.

“Don’t Ask Anyone to be Your Mentor,” is the title of one of Sandberg’s chapters. Instead, she advocates asking people both senior and junior to you for specific advice to solve a problem. This will engender much more productive relationships than a simplistic, general plea for mentoring.

8. Women should ask their partners to do at least half the parenting work.

Sandberg stakes out controversial ground on this point as well. She says women have to stop being “maternal gatekeepers” and both insist their partners do more parenting and housework and stop trying to control the way their partners do those jobs. She acknowledges that this is difficult but makes a convincing case about how necessary it is if women are going to pursue demanding careers. She also writes about “the myth of doing it all.” Despite my impression that Sandberg believed women could be corporate titans while somehow magically parenting their kids perfectly at the same time, she writes affectingly about how tough it was for her to find a balance that worked—restricting her time in the office to 9 am to 5:30 every day, having dinner with her kids when she isn’t traveling, and working from home after they go to bed.

9. It’s important to have this conversation.

Sandberg understands that many women don’t want both a career and family, and that others don’t care about ascending to a power position. She gets that the majority of working women must struggle to meet monthly expenses and to put food on the table. She acknowledges that she is preaching to the privileged few who have the education and the connections to make it to positions of power. But she insists that increased numbers of women in leadership roles will help the status and opportunities of all women. She wants women to talk about getting ahead and what it means to seek leadership roles.

10. Sandberg has written a compelling, readable book.

Though she could have made this volume more preachy and less substantive, Sandberg has achieved the opposite, a book that has a powerful message but that is also full of personal vulnerability and first-hand anecdotes, packed with statistics and footnoted studies that back her points. She writes about her divorce in her 20s and how she felt it signified a personal failing, about how, as a girl, she felt ashamed when people called her “bossy,” and how she was racked with self-doubt while a college student, even though she was near the top of her class at Harvard. Along with the Howard/Heidi study, she writes about a 2002 survey of medical students in a surgery rotation showing that women gave themselves lower scores than the men even though faculty evaluations gave the women higher ratings. A 2012 study of thousands of political candidates revealed that the men were 60% more likely to say they were “very qualified” to run for office. A 2004 assessment of Harvard law students found that in skills related to practicing law, women gave themselves lower scores than men. Those are just a few of many examples.

As a Forbes editor, I was most charmed by an anecdote Sandberg shares about how she reacted to the August 2011 Forbes list of the world’s 100 most powerful women. That year we ranked Sandberg No. 5 on the list, ahead of First Lady Michelle Obama and Indian politician Sonia Gandhi. “Far from feeling powerful, I felt embarrassed and exposed,” she writes, adding that she told colleagues that she thought the list was “ridiculous.” Until her longtime executive assistant, Camille Hart, pulled Sandberg aside and suggested Sandberg was handling the publicity poorly.

With this anecdote Sandberg again shows her vulnerability and underlines how tough it can be, as a woman, to accept praise. Her assistant’s advice: lean in to the ranking and when people paid her a compliment, simply say “thank you.” This year Sandberg dropped to No. 10 on the list, though she is still above the president of Argentina and the CEOs of Xerox, Hewlett-Packard and IBM. By now my guess is she feels comfortable being near the top.

Note: The book is being published next week, on March 11. I read an uncorrected proof, which is subject to change.

In February 2018, I took on a new job managing and writing Forbes' education coverage. I'd spent the previous two years on the Entrepreneurs team, following six years writing for the Leadership channel. My mission with education is to explore the intersection of education a...